From the Writers Trail:
18. Sergius Stepniak 1851-1895. Russian writer: Underground Russia. Said to be the model for the Russian exile in The Railway Children. Friend of William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. Killed by a train at Woodstock Road level crossing.
31 Blandford Road W4 1DX (1893-95) and 48 Woodstock Road W4 1UF (1895) (Private houses, no access)
Sergius Stepniak was the name used in Britain by Sergius Mikhailovich Kravchinsky, a Russian anarchist and revolutionary. Stepniak (which means `man of the steppes’) fled Russia in 1878 after being implicated in a murder. Stepniak (1851-1895) arrived in London in 1885 where he worked as a journalist and published a book on the Russian revolutionary movement (Underground Russia) which was to have a great impact on the early British Socialist movement.
Stepniak numbered William Morris, Walter Sickert and George Bernard Shaw among his friends and was extremely popular: ‘one of the gentlest of men, a man of a sweet and lovable nature’ is how one friend described him. It is said that Stepniak was the model for the Russian exile in Edith Nesbit’s novel The Railway Children.
Stepniak lived at 31 Blandford Road from 1893 to 1895 when he moved to 48 Woodstock Road. Later that year he was killed on the level crossing of the North & South Western Junction Railway line in Woodstock Road. Around a thousand mourners turned out for his funeral procession from Chiswick to Waterloo (he was buried at Brookwood cemetery near Woking.
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On 23 December 1895 the Russian exile and anarchist Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky (usually known as Stepniak – see Wikipaedia link) was killed by a train on the Hammersmith branch at Woodstock Road; there was a pedestrian crossing there, and the site later became the Woodstock Road station (picture, left. courtesy of Bedford Park Streets and Houses on Twitter – see below).
He was walking from his house in Woodstock Road to resume a conference in Shepherds Bush, a moderately short walk. Climbing the stile at the crossing, he seems not to have heard the approaching North London Railway passenger train, and he was run over by it and died of injuries.
- The Railway Children, Arms and the Man and The Gadfly – via Twitter
@WBYeatsBedfordParkArtProject, December 23rd 2020:
Anarchist Sergius Stepniak d. #otd 1895 at railway crossing on #bedfordpark’s Woodstock Rd (where #yeatses lived before moving to nearby Blenheim Rd where their garden + Stepniak’s were back-to-back): the model for E. Nesbit’s ‘Railway Children’ Russian exile, he advised GBS (George Bernard Shaw) on Balkan uniforms for ‘Arms and the Man’ + co-edited ‘Free Russia’ with author Lily Voynich (right) whose novel ‘The Gadfly’ drew on his life. (Lily’s antiquarian husband discovered the ‘Voynich’ manuscript + her mathematician father, George Boole, invented computing!)
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@BedfordPark StreetsandHouses:
All the houses on the east side of Woodstock at the north end of the road would have backed onto a railway line. The kids could literally run to the end of their gardens to see steam trains pass by. The picture (above left) is a train on the Bath Road crossing where Stepniak was killed.
- Golden Age: The Railway Children by Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
“The Russian who turns up at the station having escaped imprisonment in Siberia
for writing a book about the Russian poor was inspired by the Russian exile Sergi Stepniak who along with his anarchist comrade Peter Kropotkin was a friend of the Blands. Ironically, Stepniak was killed by an oncoming train as he walked down the line – an accident that may well have been suicide.”
- The Railway Children – and Bedford Park
The film of ‘The Railway Children’ (1970) was shown on BBC Two in December 2020, 50 years after it was made, and it contains further links with Bedford Park W4. Image copyright Movie-locations.com.
The scenes in the Waterburys’ London house, before their move to Yorkshire, were filmed at 4 Gainsborough Gardens (left), a private road in Hampstead, north-west London.
Wikipedia says: “The creation and aesthetics” of the road were influenced by the Bedford Park development in Chiswick and No 4 was the first completed building. It was designed by E.J. May, the estate architect of Bedford Park.
Chiswick Timeline Writers Trail
Read more stories via the Writers Tales page.
The Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books lists almost 500 writers who have written a book and lived in Chiswick W4, or written books about the area. See A Quick Guide.